brainwashed wrote:Is there a cheat cheat or translator for the common abbreviations used? I'm not understanding half of the abbreviations listed and would love to be able to follow the guide. It looks amazing.

Maybe I could look at Wowhead with the class spells open and try to see what matches where.

Thanks in advance and sorry to be a rookie.

There is a glossary posted somewhere - I'll add it to the list of links.

Thinking about it, given this FAQ is potentially the first place people look, I'll add the top dozen abbreviations to the FAQ so people can understand WTF I'm talking about.

As playing mostly ret, I really don't care for the reliance on RNG at the moment, and wanted to try my hand at tanking. It's kind of daunting with the cata content, and now that I'm 85, I can't really queue up for the 80is dungeons, so it's hard to get practice. I just don't want to screw up and waste peoples time, as patience seems to be thin most of the time. Any advice on getting practice? Regardless, this guide helps out so I thank you for your effort. A question I had was consecration is almost impossible for me to use as its just too mana expensive. I currently do not have any points into hallowed ground though, so mostly I have been using inq/HW in its place. Is this normal?Here is a link to my build, but I will update my sig as well.http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/t ... n/advanced

I think that's a good basic Frequently Asked Question that a lot of people who have in the distant past played a prot pally will be asking now, and the answer is: YES. Consecration has been demoted to an ineffectual mana hog of a spell, which should only be broken out when swarmed with mobs, and then only while under the influence (of Inq). I personally prefer not to spend points in hallowed ground (seeing as its not that great of a talent), and just work "around" consecration.

As playing mostly ret, I really don't care for the reliance on RNG at the moment, and wanted to try my hand at tanking. It's kind of daunting with the cata content, and now that I'm 85, I can't really queue up for the 80is dungeons, so it's hard to get practice. I just don't want to screw up and waste peoples time, as patience seems to be thin most of the time. Any advice on getting practice? Regardless, this guide helps out so I thank you for your effort. A question I had was consecration is almost impossible for me to use as its just too mana expensive. I currently do not have any points into hallowed ground though, so mostly I have been using inq/HW in its place. Is this normal?Here is a link to my build, but I will update my sig as well.http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/t ... n/advanced

One possible way to practice would be to solo something potentially difficult and try to stay alive. It won't help with the skills in picking up adds and saving others, but it will help with the skills os staying alive while avoiding damage and pushing buttons.

Just as an example, enter into some of the new zones on regular mode and tank the first trash pack by yourself. Stuns, interupts, LoH, WoG'ing, paying attention to which mob is doing what, keeping things in front of you, utilizing line of sight, all of these things come into play when you're in a situation which can kill you pretty quick.

Once you're good at keeping yourself alive, it'll be easier to divert your attention to keeping others alive.

I would rephrase the answer on seals a little. It goes against the grain, but I am finding seal of insight absolutely amazing for soloing, heroic 5 mans and PvP. Switching from truth to insight is like night and day. I can't comment about raiding, as I have not done it yet post-Cata, but suspect with vengance, we CAN usually afford to lose 1/6 of our tps. At least past a certain point in the fight. Indeed, for tanking proper, my hunch is that it is probably best to switch seals - start off with truth, when you need to lock down aggro (esp. on adds), then switch to insight when survival/healer mana starts to be an issue. [My own mana is also more of a problem for me in 5-mans than I anticipated and insight trivialises that.]

That sounds perfect for threat. But I am a little bit concerned about pulling without holy shield up. How do you go about dangerous pulls on survival fights?

Don't worry so much about Holy Shield before the pull. It's an extra 10% if you block, shouldn't be the end of the world. A lot different that WotLK where it was extra block rating.

Divine Plea before the pull for 3 HP, Judge for Sacred Duty while running in, then ShoR once in melee range, then go into your rotation. Holy Shield will be up and you'll maybe take one hit without it.

Also remember that when you pull, you have full health, your healers all have full mana and everything off cooldown, and you have zero vengeance and no threat lead. Taking a couple big hits isn't such a bad thing, it'll help get combat flowing. It would take a gimmick fight for the tank to die within the first ten seconds of the pull.

I usually don't open with a shield slam; you can get two slams with possible SD procs and wings up if you open it right, at which point threat is pretty much resolved for the rest of the fight. If you don't have any hunters or rogues, or it's a fight where a hard opening burn is important, you may want to reconsider. And of course some fights the DPS has to do something other than hit the boss for the first ten seconds.

Haven't tanked in awhile (since pre 4.0 patch). finished leveling my hunter to 85 and got sick of ridiculous 45minute wait times. I Plan on running a lot of randoms as tank. First time in got BRC and did ok no wipes or anything but i did a lot wrong. Had to come refresh myself here on tanking basics. Didn't use CS at all was basically judging, sotr and consecration and AS when off CD.

Read up on new tanking basics and then had some fun. On on pull I had inquisition up, popped wings, shammy popped hero and i had 3HP hit SOtR and wow did it hit hard...im only at level 82 on my paladin and I crit for 34K never seen a SoTR hit for really even half that before. I lold pretty hard.

This might be just me but it seems a bit odd for a basics guide not to even mention Aura management. It could be that using Devotion Aura is such a no-brainer that it needs not mentioning or that the choice is so situational that not much can be said, but it might be good to give people a push to the right direction.

Haven't really been able to find info on what are the more specific trade-offs from different auras. I get that trading Devotion Aura to Retribution aura is trading mitigation to threat and DPS but how much of the former are you losing and how much of the latter gaining? How much elemental damage needs to be dished out during the fight for the Resistance Aura to be worth it? Are there buffs from other classes that don't overlap with a specific aura and we should know to skip it?

Or I could be just completely missing the place where auras are discussed. If so I do apologize. Feel free to point me the right way.

The ONLY time I switch auras is one if I am fighting only an elemental I switch to resistance, or if I am kiting mobs around (i.e Rajh fight in Halls) I will switch to ret stop every few feet let them get a couple whacks and throw a HotR start running again. I am spec'd for PoJ. It si so situational that you can't really give any advice to it. Devotion is ran 90%, followed by resistance 9%, Ret 1%.

We nearly always have a Resto Shaman that's doing Stoneskin (usually have another shaman or DK for str/agi) and Healing Stream which has resistance with a glyph (?). So I mostly use retribution since that's about the only thing that doesn't overlap with anything else.

If it is weak, kill it before it gets stronger. If it is strong, weaken it.

Basic question for all you protection paladin's out there. I've been 85 a couple of weeks now, and I've been collecting rep and normal gear, also breaking into heroics and getting some gear there. But something feels wrong. I die very easily. And I've been doing a lot of reading. Ending up here. Some of what I am reading confuses me, so I've a couple of questions to clear things up.

I Started off by making sure I was both Hit capped (8%), and expertise soft capped (26), This was done by reforging the higher of the dodge or parry rating (to avoid diminishing returns?). I still seemed squishy, nothing felt right (I do appreciate things are harder now). So the link you see above is me being hit capped but not bothering yet with the expertise cap.

Then I started reading here. And something I have seen a few times now has me confused. "You don't seem to be reforging hit / expertise into Mastery" - Huh? This was in response to someone who's freshly hit 85. Are we now saying don't bother with hit or expertise? And instead reforge it all off to Mastery to mitigate damage? Would this not gimp all our threat?

Second question. Parry and dodge. They both seem to be doing the same thing, avoiding damage. However I have been noticing a lot of gear has massive parry numbers on but there's not so much dodge gear out there. I read somewhere that you should reforge the higher of the two ratings to the other to avoid diminishing returns. True?

Thanks for reading. Hopefully when I check back here tomorrow I'll feel enlightened

This is a very quick response with general advice – I can’t/won’t check your Armoury stats while at work. I also prefer to give general advice that any new tankadin could use rather than specific advice for one person.

Arklight wrote:I Started off by making sure I was both Hit capped (8%), and expertise soft capped (26),

You’re Doing It Wrong

Taunt no longer misses. Bosses no longer parry-haste, and even if they did they no longer parry-gib (because you shouldn’t be 2-hit under normal circumstances).

Arklight wrote:I still seemed squishy, nothing felt right (I do appreciate things are harder now). So the link you see above is me being hit capped but not bothering yet with the expertise cap.

If you're squishy, why are you re-forging anti-squishy stats into threat stats?

I’m reforging hit and expertise into mastery. I am generally trying to avoid reforging avoidance (parry/dodge) but when I do, it’s always avoidance -> mastery. I am not reforging anything to expertise at the moment, and would never reforge to hit unless there's a mechanics change re taunt missing.

Also: Expertise is a much better threat stat than hit anyway. If you were reforging for threat, you aim for Expertise hard-cap before you switch to Hit.

Arklight wrote:Then I started reading here. And something I have seen a few times now has me confused. "You don't seem to be reforging hit / expertise into Mastery" - Huh? This was in response to someone who's freshly hit 85. Are we now saying don't bother with hit or expertise? And instead reforge it all off to Mastery to mitigate damage?

Correct, we don't bother with hit/expertise in 4.0. Reforge using this priority list:(1) Threat to Mastery.(2) Avoidance to Mastery.(3) The End. Do not reforge for threat.

Arklight wrote:Would this not gimp all our threat?

Yes it gimps our threat, but we don’t care. Spec full mitigation and full WoG maximisation. ShoR a couple of times on the pull, with Wings up, get your threat lead, then switch to Seal of Insight + WoG spam. You’ll still massively out-threat your DPS and you’ll be a lot less squishy. You should also be using CDs a lot more, and a lot more reactively than you did in ICC. You have three, and one is on a 1 min CD. Spam it.

Data point: With a full WoG-spam build, and mastery-heavy reforging, I can still out-threat equivalent-geared DPS 2:1 if I spam ShoR. I can easily hold aggro against DPS that significantly out-gear me if required, even in heroics with low vengeance levels. With high-vengeance levels, threat is a complete joke, even with DPS who significantly out-gear me. I'm only raiding part-time 10-man, I'm in a guild with full-time 25-man raiders, I took a break over Christmas / New Years, some of them didn't. Despite this, I'm less pushed for threat than I was in ICC-hard.

Arklight wrote:Second question. Parry and dodge. They both seem to be doing the same thing, avoiding damage. However I have been noticing a lot of gear has massive parry numbers on but there's not so much dodge gear out there. I read somewhere that you should reforge the higher of the two ratings to the other to avoid diminishing returns. True?

True, but in general you should avoid re-forging parry/dodge if there’s something else you can switch to Mastery.

Tip 3: I've hardly done any raiding at all. I have no raid drops. Check out my gear (hopefully I'm in PvE rather than PvP gear), it's all easy to get 346 blues and easily sourced epics. Make sure you do random heroics for your Valour points so you can get your relic (and other stuff later). Aim for a similar gear-set. Admittedly, my boots suck - I'm working on Dragonmaw rep at the moment for the exalted tanking boots.

Much appreciated. I was basing all of this off ElitistJerks.com's Prot pally field guide. Obviously it's been very very wrong. I just checked back and as of the 3rd there's been an update which says "Threat is not an issue at all, other than the first few moments of the fight. Hit/Exp isn't needed until you're at the 104.2% "cap". Use mitigation/armor/avoidance to reach that number, then any excess you can start getting hit/exp. Survive/mitigate damage first, that's priority. After a few 30k SotR, threat no longer matters."

I'm just going to stick with Maintankadin now, i've picked up more decent stuff here in 5 minutes of reading last night than in 2 weeks of reading elsewhere. Keep up the good work. Time to go and become badass again.

Last edited by Arklight on Tue Jan 04, 2011 3:52 am, edited 1 time in total.